Discover the Anatomy of initrd 41
IdaAshley writes "The Linux initial RAM disk (initrd) is a temporary root file system that is mounted during system boot to support the two-state boot process. It contains various executables and drivers that permit the real root file system to be mounted, after which the initrd RAM disk is unmounted and its memory freed. In this article explore the initial RAM disk for Linux 2.6, including its creation and use in the Linux kernel. In many embedded Linux systems, the initrd is the final root file system."
Great tutorial (Score:5, Informative)
As well as mkinitrd, there are some cool tools coming along that help build an initrd.
Here is one I have used, and although it's very early in it's development cycle.
http://yaird.alioth.debian.org/ [debian.org]
Are there any more that are actually easy to use?
Re:Great tutorial (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great tutorial (Score:1)
Re:Great tutorial (Score:2)
Mkinitramfs (Score:2)
* I had a very small problem getting it to work the first time, but that problem has been fixed since then.
Re:OMFG! (Score:1, Offtopic)
More trouble... (Score:4, Interesting)
-matthew
Re:More trouble... (Score:3, Informative)
I did it once, and even used it on my machine at home for many months, before I went back to Slackware.
It's really instructive, if you want to know how Linux is organized.
I, for one, feel unconfortable having lots of software running in my system that I don't know what it is, what's their purpose, and if I can turn it off nor not. LFS made me know which is which. Also, it gives great understanding of the boot process.
I highly recommend it: http://www.linuxfro [linuxfromscratch.org]
Nontrivial Boot Environments (Score:4, Interesting)
Take, for example, booting onto a root on a SAN--specifically a Coraid Ethernet SAN.
During boot, you must bring up the ethernet interface, load the AoE module, probe for the SAN, wait for it to quiesce, then enable clustering, join the cluster, join the fence domain, allow the cluster to quiesce, load the DLM, enable CLVM, probe and activate everything, then mount your root GFS (or OCFS2 if you can get that working).
This would not be possible without a good initrd.
Also, not so obviously, distros aren't the only people who deploy a single kernel on lots of hardware. When you have 300 old Dells, 150 old gateways, 75 custom built boxen, and a handful of laptops, maintaining a single kernel and initrd beats maintaining ten of them. Not your use case, but definitely important.
Re:Nontrivial Boot Environments (Score:2)
The reason an initrd works is because it's the bootloader's responsibility to load the initrd, and one would hope that the bootloader has support for the hard
Re:Nontrivial Boot Environments (Score:2)
Re:Nontrivial Boot Environments (Score:2)
Just like anything else that is supported at boot, it is actually compiled into the kernel.. in theory it could contain loadable modules too but I think that would be
Re:Nontrivial Boot Environments (Score:2)
Yes. But those "times" are unlikely to add up to even 0.1% of the times where initrd are employed.
All distros I know off set up a initrd-thing even for bog-standard root on locally attached (ide|sata|scsi) devices.
I don't see the point of it. Yes. It makes perfect sense in some scenarios. It does however *not* make any sense whatsoever in most standard, simple, cases. Why it's nevertheless done beats me.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More trouble... (Score:1)
Furthermore, the proc filesystem, like most (all?) virtual filesystems, doesn't care what the device name is. Most people use "none", for clarity, but
Re:More trouble... (Score:2)
Re:More trouble... (Score:1)
The point of an initrds (now, at least) is to pull out the work of finding the root filesystem from the kernel and get it into userspace, which is much easier to maintain. Eventually, even "regular" root devices/filesystems will be mounted by an initrd, and the kernel will be that much smaller and more maintainable.
(I'm using "initrd" as a synonym for "initramfs", even though the
Re:More trouble... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More trouble... (Score:2)
Whenever I recompile a kernel, initrd is the first thing to go. All you need in the kernel to make initrd irrelevent is disk and filesystem (and maybe software RAID modules) support.
That's going to be harder and harder to do. For example, one of these days, in-kernel RAID detection is going away in favor of a userspace tool (in initrd). It's already that way with LVM.
This makes good sense in general in light of the trent towards more and more hot-plugable devices. For instance, RAID. Without hot-plug,
Initramfs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Initramfs? (Score:5, Informative)
Initramfs, IIRC, has these advantages:
It doesn't need block level drivers compiled into the kernel to read itself like initrd does.
It uses the kernel cache area as its file storage area so you don't have to allocate space with a ramdisk.
The mem it used to store files with temporarily can be returned to the kernel after the kernel has booted.
No artificial size limit.
All in all, it's a much better alternative.
Re:Initramfs? (Score:3, Informative)
It has a huge disadvantage: it's compiled into the kernel, so you can't easily change it (bad for desktop systems).
Re:Initramfs? (Score:2)
An initramfs CAN be compiled into the kernel, but usually isn't. Normally, grub loads the gzipped cpio into ram and points to it just like a gzipped ramdisk. The kernel uncompresses it into the ramfs and releases the memory used for the archive.
On Fedora and others, the mkinitrd utility actually creates an initramfs these days. Try zcat /boot/initrd-whatever | cpio -it.
Re:Initramfs? (Score:2)
I think it depends on your application (and bootloader), really.
initramfs vs. initrd (Score:3, Interesting)
Initramfs is synthesized from the stock page and dentry caches. The nice thing about
initramfs is that RAM gets released to the dynamic pool when an inode is deleted. So
it's a good choice for files that need to be present at boot time but not kept around,
like kernel modules. The bad thing: each file occupies at least one page, and that's
64KiB here. An initramfs with lots of little files can waste beaucoup bytes.
RAM "disks" are devices tha
Re:initramfs vs. initrd (Score:2)
Interesting! I didn't realize that the kernel provided that. Neat!
I read somewhere else that if you're using cpio format archives, you can provide a list of them to the bootloader they'll all be extracted to the initramfs. (syslinux at least claims this - I don't know about others and I haven't tried it personally on
Re:Initramfs? (Score:2)
More More More!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Stick to our techie roots.
F*ck that, give us more politics! (Score:4, Funny)
Options for fast booting (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know much about this, but am curious.
Why, once the system is booted cleanly, can't it save its state in initrd, and just load the state the next time without going through the boot process? Would that result in fast booting?
Re:Options for fast booting (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of the boot time is "wasted" in loading modules into memory, loading needed services (daemons, scripts to set up the environment, etc.). The time required to load up the initrd image is minimal, and few other things are "created" during boot (maybe
What you are proposing would offer little speed increase: you still have to load everything into memory. And
Do not use those instructions! (Score:2)
Unfortunatly, the article starts well by explaining initramfs (using a compressed cpio rather than a block device image), but then leads the reader down the initrd path.
Initramfs is intended to superceed initrd for several good reasons.
For one, it's more efficient. Files in an initramfs are a special case of filesystem where the file is loaded into the generic file cache but has no backing storage (that is, it doesn't live on a block device). OTOH, an initrd is a simple image of a block device. It has a